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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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The article explains that part but the short version is:
when miners operate at loss, they start to leave.
The less miners there is the lower the difficulty to mine becomes so its cheaper to mine until and equilibrium is restored.
problem is that difficulty adjustment is not automatic and its done only once every few months so until next adjustment miners would have to operate at loss or sell their expensive equipment and exit for good.
Last time I checked it was automatic and done each 2.016 blocks, which should ideally take 14 days time (10 minutes per block at average).
When the difficulty gets adjusted, it gets automatically set to a level, which would take exactly 14 days to mine the next 2.016 blocks.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
I'm no friend of PoW in general and even less so of the way Bitcoin implemented it (resource hungry arms race for specialized hardware compared to PoW done only by general computing devices cough Monero), but insinuating there'd be some manual adjustment is disingenuous.
Yes I incorrectly wrote "not automatic" when it should've been "not instant". Thanks for the correction also for correcting the delay.
The gist of my comment is still valid though. miners are operating at a loss because they're waiting for the difficulty adjustment to happen.
The gist of you comment is valid and points out a major flaw:
miners need to operate at a gain.
With shrinking amounts of BTC being created by the network for producing blocks (that reward getting halved each 210,000 blocks), that gain is at risk, because it can be doubted whether transaction fees can cover the gap.
With that gain being at risk, the network security is going to be at risk.
Ethereum did the right thing and aligned ETH holders and block producers by switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
That also reduced the ecological footprint to a tiny fraction of what it was before.
I am 100% pro Ethereum for adopting proof of work. Though for me its for ethical/environmental reasons not technical
It does sound lik e a major moan error.